Machine and Organism

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China , 1958 .Henri Cartier -Bresso n /Ma gnum Photos

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Machine and OrganismGeorges Canguilhem

The relationship between machine and organism has generally been studiedin only one way. Nearly always, th e organism has been explained on th e basisof a preconceived idea of th e st ructure and functioning of th e machine; butonly rarely have the structure and function of the organism been used to maketh e construction of th e machine itself more understandable. Even th oughmechani stic theory sparked some very impressive technical research, the factremained that the very notion of an "organology," as well as its basic premisesand methodology, remained undeveloped. I

Philosophers and mechanistic biologists approached the machine as a setof data, or else made it into a problem that th ey could solve purely throughmental application. To do this, they called on the engineer, who was for thema scient ist in th e truest sense. Misled by th e ambiguities of thei r view ofmechanics, they saw machines only as theorems in concrete form . The operations necessary to construct machines were only secondary considerationswhen compared wit h th e all-important idea th at the machine revealed theirtheories in concreto . To see this, one needed onlyto acknowledge what sciencecould accomplish, and from th ere it was simply a mat ter of th e confidentapplicat ion of th at knowledge. However, I do not believe th at it is possible totreat the biological problem of th e "living machine" by separating it from thetec hnological problem it supposedly resolves - namely, the problem of the relationship between technology and science. This problem is normally resolvedby starting wit h the idea th at , logically and chronologically, knowledge precedes application .What I wan t to show is that th e cons truction of machinescan indeed be understood by virtue of certain truly biological principles, without having at th e same time to examine how technology relates to science.

I shall address the following topics in success ive order: what it means tocompare an organism to a machine; th e relationship between mechanicalprocesses, and the results th at might be achieved by using them ;and the historical reversal of the traditional relationship between the machine and theorganism and th e phil osophical consequences of thi s reversal.

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For those who have carefully studie d living beings an d the form s th ey take, itis rare - and only in th e case of th e vertebrates - that on e notices any trulymechanical at t r ibutes , at least in th e se nse that th e term is commonly un derstood by scie ntists. In La Pensee technique, for example, Julien Pacotte notesthat movements of t he j oi nts and the eyeball can be paralleled with wha t mathematicians call a "mechanism,"?A machine can be defined as a ma n-made,artificial const ruction, whi ch esse nt ially fun ctions by virtue of mechanicalope rations. A mechanism is mad e of a group of mobile solid parts that worktogeth e r in suc h a way that th ei r movem ent does not th rea ten the in tegrityof th e unit as a whole. A mechanism therefore consists of movable parts thatwork toget her and per iodi cally return to a set rel ation with respec t to eac hother. It consists of interlinking parts, each of which has a de terminabledeg ree of freedo m of movem ent: for example, both a pendulum an d a ca mvalve have one degree of freedom of movem ent, whereas a thread ed screwhas two. The fact that th ese varying degrees of freedom of movem ent can bequantified means that they can ser ve as tangible guides for measuring, forsetting limits on th e amount of movem ent that can be ex pe cted bet ween anytwo interacting solid obj ects. In every machine, th en , movem en t is a fun ction,firs t, of th e way th e parts inter act and, second, of th e mec hanical operationsof the overall unit .!

Mechanics is govern ed by the principle that every movem ent of a ma chineis geometric an d measurable. Wh a t is more, every s uc h m ovem ent regulatesand transforms the forc es an d energy imparted to it . Mechanics, though , do esno t work in the same way that a motor do es: in mechanics, movem ent s aresimply prop agat ed , not created. A rather simple example of ho w this transfor mation of movem ent ta kes place can be seen in sever al devices - a wheelcrank or an eccentri c crank, for example - th at are set in to motion by an initi allateral movem ent but even tu ally produce reciprocating, ro tary movement .O f course, mech anical ope ra tions can be combined, eithe r by superimposingth em or adding them toge th er. It is even possible to ta ke a basic mechanicaldevice, mo dify it and ma ke it capable of per forming a variety of ot her mechanical operati ons . This is exactly what happ en s wh en a bicycle fre ewheel clutchis rele ased or stopped ."

What constitutes th e ru le in h u ma n i nd ustry is th e except ion in t he s tr u cture of organisms and the except ion in nature, and I must ad d here that inthe history of tech nology and th e inventions of man assembled configurationsare not th e most primitive. The oldest kn ow n tools are mad e of a single piece.The cons tr uction of axes or of ar rows made by assembling a flint an d a handle, or the construc tion of nets or fabrics, are so many signs that the primitive stage has been passed.This bri ef overvie w of some elementary principles of kin ematics helps to


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give a fuller sens e of the problem without losing sight of a central paradox:W hy was it necessary to turn to the theory of mechanism , as outlin ed above,in order to explain the living organism ? T he answer can be found , it seems,in the fact that this mechanical model of living organisms do es not rely onki nematics alone. A m achine, as defined above, is not totally self- sufficien t : itmust rece ive an d th en transform energy imparted to it from an outside source.To be represen ted in movement it mu st be associated with an energy source. "

Fo r a long time, ki nematic mechanism s were po wered by human s or animals . During thi s stage, it was an obvio us tautology to compare the movemen tof bodies to the movem ent of a machine, w he n t he ma chine itself dep en dedon humans or animals to run it . Cons equently, it ha s been shown that mechanistic theory has dep ended , historically, on the assumption that it is possibleto construct an autom aton, meaning a mechanism that is miraculous in an dof itself an d do es not rely o n h um an or an imal muscle power.

This is the general idea put forth in the following well-known text :Examine care fully the physical economy of man: What do you find ? Th e jaws arear med with teet h , which are no mo re than pincer s. This stomac h is nothing but aret ort , or heat chamber; the veins, th e ar teries and in deed th e ent ire vascular system are simply hydraulic tu bes; the hear t, a pump ; the viscera, nothing but filtersand sieves; the lu ngs, a pair o f bellows; and what are mu scles if no t a syste m ofcables an d ropes. What is the oculomotor nerve, if no t a pull ey? And so on. Tryas they will, chemists cannot explain natu re and set up a separate philosophy simply by coining a new vocabulary around words like " fusion," "sublimation" and"precipitation"; for thi s does not at all address either th e incontrovert ible laws ofequilibrium or th e laws governing the workings of the wedge, cables, pumps aselemen ts of mechanical theory.

Thi s text is no t whe re we mi ght think to find it, but in fact com es f ro m thePraxis medica, written by Baglivi in 1696, an Ital ian do ct or belonging to theiatrome chanical schoo!. T his school, founded by Borelli , ha d apparently beeninfluenced by Descartes, although for rea so ns of national prestige, the Italian sprefer to attribute it to Galileo. This text is in terest in g be ca use it treats thewe dge, the ro pe, the cabl e an d the pump as if they co uld be seen in the sam et erms for formulating explanatory principles. It is clea r, ho wever, that fromthe mechanistic point of view there is a difference between th ese devices: acable essentially transmits a given movement, wh ereas a pump transforms agiven mo vement and is also a motor - admitted ly, a motor tha t retu rns whatever energy it receives; but, at ce rtain intervals, it ap par ently has a de gre e ofin dep endence of movement. In Baglivi's text, the heart is the primum mavens- the central pump that serves as the motor for the whole body.

Therefore, a crucial element be hin d the mechanical explanation of bodilymo vement is that, in addition to machines that perform as kinematic devices,

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there are also machines that act as motors, der iving thei r ene rgy, at the moment it is utilized , from a source other than animal muscle. And th is is why,although Baglivi's text seems linked to Descartes, the idea of the body-asmachine act ually goes back to Aristotle. W hen dealing with the Cartesiantheory of th e animal-machine, it is of ten difficult to decide whether or notDesca rtes had any pr ecu rsors for thi s idea. Th ose who look for Descartes'spredecessors here usually ci te Gome z Perei ra, a Spanish doctor of the secondhalf of th e sixte ent h century: Perei ra suggested, before Descartes, that hecoul d demonstrate that animals we re wholly machines and that they do no tpossess th at sensitive soul so frequently attr ibuted to th ern.? Bu t in otherrespects, it is unquestionably Aristotle who saw the congruity between animalmovements and aut omat ic mechanical movements, like those obs erved ininstruments of war, especially catapults. This idea is trea ted rather extensivelyby Alfred Espinas, who discusses th e connec tion bet ween the problems dealtwith by Aristot le in De Motu atiimalium and th ose in his compilation ofQuaestiones mechanicae.8 Aristot le draws a clear parallel bet ween the organsof animal movement an d "oreana ," or parts of war ma chines, like th e ar m ofa catapult about to launch a projectile. Thus cata pults, typical automaticma chines of the per iod , seeme d to be articulate d like a hu man limb, as th eywere poi sed and made to release their great stores of pent-up ene rgy. In thesame work, Aristotle carr ies th e analogy even fur ther by comparing th e movemen t of our limbs to mechanisms; an d he makes his case in much the sameway that Plato di d when, in the Titnaeus, he compared the movement ofvertebrates to hi nges or pivots.

It is true that in Aristotle th e theory of movement is some what differentfrom what it would become in Descartes. According to Aris totle, th e soul isth e principle of all movement. All movem en t first presupposes immobilityand then re quires a p rime mover or some motivating force. Desire movesth e body, and des ire is explaine d by the soul, jus t as potentiality is explainedby an act . Despite their differ ing explanations of movement, for Aristo tle asfor Descar tes later, the comp arison of t he body with a machine presupposestha t man is composed of automated mechanical parts relian t on an energysource th at produces motor effects over ti me an d continue to do so well afterth e or iginal (human or animal) ene rgy has di ssipated. It is th is discrepancybetween the sto rage of energy to be released by the mechanism and the moment of release th at allows us to forget the relation of depen dence betweenthe effec ts of the mechanism and the actions of a body. When Descar tes looksto machines to explain how organisms work, he invokes spring-operated andhydraulic aut omata. As a result, he owes a great in tellectual deb t to the ideasbehind the technical cre ations of his ow n ti me, including clocks and watc hes,wate r mill s and church organs of the early seven te enth century. We can say,


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th en , th at as long as the concept of th e human and animal body is inextricably"tied" to the machine, it is not possible to offer an explanation of the bodyin terms of the machine. Historically, it was not possible to conce ive of suc han explanation until the day th at human ingenuity created mechanical devicesthat not only imitated organic movements - as in th e launching of a projec tile or the back-and-forth movement of a saw - but also required no humanintervention except to construct them and set th em going

In two instances, I have asser ted th at an explanation cannot be formulatedwithout the ex iste nce of certain conditions . Is thi s tantamount to attributinga histor ical necessity to scientific explanatio n? How do I explain th e abruptappearance in Descartes of a lucid mechanistic interpretation of biologicalphenomena? This theory is clearly related to modi fications th at occ urred inthe eco nomic and political structure of Western society, but th e nature ofth is relation remains obscure.

This problem has been treated in depth by P-M . Schuhl, who has shownth at in ancien t phil osophy the opposition of science and technique paralleledthe opposition of freedo m and servitude and , at a deep er level, of art and nature.? Schuh] supports th is parallel with Aristo tle's assertion that natural andviolent movemen t are opposed - a violent movem en t occurs whe n mechanisms are used agains t nature, and its characteristics are th at it exhausts itselfrapidly and never becomes habitu al - which is to say, a permanent tendencyto reproduce itself never obtains .Here I must turn to th e difficu lt problem of th e history of civilizationand the philosophy of history. With Aristotle, th e hierarchy of freedo m andservility, of th eory and pract ice, of nature and ar t, is paralleled by an economic and political hierarchy in the cit ies , namely, the relations of freemenand slaves. The slave, according to Ar istotle in the Politics, is an an imatedmachine.10This is th e cr ux of the problem to which Schuhl only alludes inpassing: Did th e Greek conception of the dignity of scie nce lead to thei r disda in for technique and th e resultant pauci ty of inventions? And did thi s inturn lead to th e difficul ty of applying the results of technical activity to theexplanation of nature? Or, rather, did the Greeks' high regard for purelyspeculative science and detached contemplation explain th e absence of technical invention ? Did th ei r disregard for work cause slavery, or did the abundance of slaves due to military supremacy explain thei r low regard for work?Are we obliged to explain th e ideology in terms of th e socioeconomic st ructure or, rather, th e socioeconomic st ructure in te rms of th e ideology? Di dthe ease of exploiting human beings make it easier to disdain th e techniquesth at would allow them to exploit nature? Does the arduousness of exploiti ngnature ju stify the exploitation of man by man? Is there a causal relationshipat work here? And if so, in which direction does it go? Or are we dealing with

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a global structure having recip rocal relation s and influences?A similar problem is presented by Father Lucien Laberthonniere, who

contrasts th e physics of an artist or an aest he te to that of an engineer and anar tisan." Laberthonniere suggests th at th e determining factor her e is ideas,given that the Cartesian transformation in th e philosophy of technique presupposes Christianity. It was necessary to conce ive ofman as a being whotranscends nature and ma tter in order to then uphold his right and his du tyto explo it matter ru thlessly, In other words, ma n had to be valorized so thatnature could be deva lo rized. Next it was necessary to conce ive of men asbeing radically and or iginally equal so that , as th e exploitation of human s byeac h other was condemned on political grounds, there were increased tech-nical means to exploit nature and a growing sense of du ty to do so. This analysis pe rmits Laberthonniere to speak of a Christian origin for Cartes ian physics.However, he qualifies his own claim: th e physics and technique supposedlymade po ssible by Christianity came, for Descartes, well after Chr istianity hadbeen founded as a religion . Moreover, humanist phil osophy, which saw manas master and pr opri etor of nature, was in direct oppos ition to Christianityas humanists saw it: the religion of salvation, of esca pe in to the hereafter, inspired by a contempt for the things of thi s life and unconcerned with whateverfru its technology might win for mankind in thi s world below. Laberthonniereasserts th at "t ime does no t enter in to the question," but thi s is by no meanscertain. In any case, several classic texts have demon st rated th at cer tain techni-cal inventions th at transformed th e use of animal motor power - for example,the horsesho e and the shoulder harness - accomplished more for the emancipation of slaves than did the countless pr eachings of abolitionists.

In Der Uber8an8 vomJe udalem zum biir8erlichen Weltbi ld, Franz Borkenauargues th at ther e is a c ausal relationship between mechanistic phil osophy andthe totality of soc ial and economic condit ions in which it ar ises. 12 He claimsthat at th e sta rt of th e seventee nth century th e qualitative philosophy of antiquity and the Midd le Ages was eclipsed by mechanistic ideas. The success ofthese new ideas was, on the level of ideology, an effect of the eco nomic factof th e new organization and expansion of manu facturing. For Borkenau, thedivision of art isanal labo r into separate, simplified operat ions requiring littleskill produce d th e concept of abstract soc ial labor. Once labor had been decomposed into simple, identical and easily repeatable movem en ts, pr ice andwages could be de te rmined simply by comparing th e hours worked - and th eresult was a process th at , previou sly qu alitative, had become quantifiable. 13Calculating work in purely qu antitative terms that can be treated mathematically is claimed to be the basis and the sta rting point for a mechanistic concep tion of th e life world. I t is therefore by redu cing all value to economicvalue, "to cold hard cash," as Marx puts it in The Communist Manifesto, th at

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th e mechanisti c view of the uni verse is supposed to be fundamentally aWeltanschauung of the bourgeoisie. Finally, Borkenau claims that the animalmachine gives rise to th e norms of th e na scent capitalist eco nomy. Descartes,Galileo and Hobbes are thus the unwitting heralds of thi s eco nomic revolution.

Borkenau's theses have been analyzed and criticized more forcefully byHenryk Gro ssmann.14According to him, Borkenau ignores five hund red yearsof economic and ideological history by see ing mechanistic th eory as co inciding with the ri se of manufacturing at the beginning of the seventeent h centu ry : Borkenau wr ites as if Leonardo da Vinci had never existed . Referringto Pierre Duhem 's Les Origines de la sta tique (1905), and th e publicati on ofLeonardo's manuscripts (Herzfeld, 1904 ; Gabriel Seailles, 1906; Peladan,1907) , Gro ssmann agrees with Seailles th at with the publication ofLeonardo'sm anuscripts it became cle ar th at the origins of modern scie nce cou ld bepushed back by more than a century. Th e quantification of the noti on of workoccurs first within mathematics, well before it s economic rationalization.The norms of the capitalist evaluation of production, moreover, had beendefined by th e Italian bankers even in the thirteenth century. Relying onMarx, Grossm ann reminds us that although in general there was no divisionof labor in manufacturing properly speaking, manu facturing at its incep tionmeant the gathering together in th e same place of skilled artisans who hadpreviou sly worked independently. According to Grossmann, th en, it is no tth e calculation of cos t per hour of work, but the evolution of mechanizati onthat is th e real cause of th e mech anical view of the universe. Th e developmentofmechanization begins during th e Renaissance. IS It is, therefore, more accurate to say that Descar tes had consc iously rati onalized a mechanistic techniquethan that he had unconsciously expressed th e imperatives of a c apitalist economy. For Descartes, mechanics is a theory ifmachines th at presupposes a spontaneous invention whic h science must then consciously promote and develop.W hich machines did th e most to modify the relationship between man

and nature before th e time ofDescar tes, far beyond t he wildest imag inationsof th e ancients - and did most to ju sti fy and rationalize th e hopes men hadveste d in machines? Above all th ere were firearms, which hardly interestedDescartes except in terms of th e problem of the projectil e. 16 On the otherhand, Descartes was very in terested in clocks and watches, in lifting machines,in water-driven machines and other related devices. As a result, one shouldsay that Descartes made a human phenomenon - th e construction ofmachines - into an in tegral part of his phil osophy; and one should avoid sayingth at he transposed th e soci al phenomena of capitalist production in to ideology.The key question becomes : How does Cartes ianism account for an in ternalprinciple of goal-directed act ivity in mech anisms, as is implied in the compar-ison of a machine wit h an organism?

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The theory of the animal -machine is inseparable from "I think therefore Iam." The rad ical distinction between the soul and the body, between though tand extension, requires the affirma tion that matter , whatever form it adopts,and th ought, whatever function it fulfill s, are each an undivided substance. 17Because t he only function of the soul is judgment, it is impossible to admitthe ex iste nce of a sou l in animals, since we have no proo f that animals judge,incapable as th ey are of language or invention. is

For Descartes, though, the refusal to attribute a soul - that is, reason - toanimals, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that animals are not alive(since not mu ch more than a warm, beating heart is at issue); no r must animals be denied sensibility, to the ex tent that suc h sensibility is so lely a functi on of their orga ns. i9

In th e same di scussion , a moral foundat ion for the animal-machine theorycomes to light. Descartes views th e animal as Ari stotle had viewed the slave,devalorizing it in order to j ustify man's using it to serve his own purp oses: "Myopinio n is no mo re cr uel to animals than it is overly pious toward men , freedfrom the supe rstitions of the Pythagori ans, because it absolves them of the hintof crime whenever they eat or kill anim als."20And it comes as no small surpriseto find the same argumen t in reverse in a passage of Leibniz: " if we are com pelled to view the animal as being more than a ma chine , we would have tobecome P y t h a ~ o r i a n s and renounce our domination of animals ."21 And so weconfront an attitude typ ical ofWestern thought . On the th eoretical level, tn emechanization of life only considers animals to the extent that th ey serve man'stechnological ends. Man can only make himself the master and propriet or ofnature if he denies any natural finality or purpose; and he mu st consider thewhole of natu re, including all life forms o ther th an him self, as solely a meansto serve his purposes.

This is how the mechanical model of the living organism, including the hu -man body, was legitintized; for already in Descartes the human body, i fnot An imal testing , c. 1970.man's entire self, is seen as a machin e. As I have already noted, Descartes basedhis mechanical model on au tomata , that is, on moving ma chines.22

In order to see th e full implications ofDescartes's theory, I now intend tolook at th e beginn ing of his "Trea tise on Man ," which was published for thefirst time in Leyden in 1662. He wrote there:

These menwill be composed, aswe are, ofasoul and a body. First I must describethe body on its own, then the soul, again on its own; and finally I must showhowthese two natures would have to be joined and united in order to constitute menwho resemble us.

I suppose the body to be nothing but a statue or machine made of earth, whichGod forms with the explicit intention of making it as much as possible like us.Thus God not only gives it externally the colors and shapes of all the parts of our

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bodies, but also places inside it all the parts required to make it walk, eat, breathe,enabling it to imitate all tho se functi ons which seem to proceed from mat ter andto depend solely on th e int eracting movemen ts of our organs.

We see clocks, artificial fountains, wate r mills and other such machin es which,although only man-made, seem to move of thei r own accord in various ways;bu t I am supposing this machine to be made by the hands of God , and so I thinkyou may reason ably think it capable of a grea ter vari ety ofmovem en ts th an Icould possibly imagine in it, and of exhibiting more artistry th an I cou ld possiblyascr ibe to it .23Were we to read this text as naively as pos sible, the theory of th e animal

machine would seem to make sense onl y if we put forward two importantand often-neglected postulates. The first is th e existence of a God who buildsthings, and th e second that living bodies are given in essence before machinesare constructed. In other words, to understand the machine-animal, it isnecessary to see it as being preceded , logically and chronologically, by God,who is an efficient cause, and by a preexi sting living model after which i t isto be mod eled or imitated, whi ch is a formal and final cause. With all this inmind , I propose to take the animal-machine theory, which is usually see n asa departure from th e Aristotelian concep t of causality, and show how all ofAristotle's types of causality are nonetheless found in it, but not always in th esame place or simultaneously.

I fwe read th e text more closely, we see that in order to construct the living machine-" it is necessary to imitate a preexi sting living mod el. The construction of a mechanical model presupposes a living original (Descar tes isperhaps closer here to Plato th an to Aristotle). The platonic Derniurge copiesthe ideas, and the Idea is th e model of which th e natural object is a copy. Th eCartesian God, the Art!fex maximus, works to produce som ething equivalentto th e living body itself. The model for th e living machine is that bod y itself.Divine art imitates the Idea - but th e Idea is th e living body.What is more,in th e same way that a regular polygon is inscribed in a circle, and th at onemust pass an infinite distance to deduce one from the other, there is something of th e machine in every aspect of life; but to pass from one to the otherwou ld require crossing over an infinite gap, one that only God can close. Thi sis the idea bro ught ou t at the end of the text: "but I am supposing thi s machineto be mad e by the hands ofGod , and so I think you may reasonably think itcap able of a greater variety ofmovements than I could possibly imagine in it ,and of exhibiting more artistry than I could possibly ascribe to it ." The theory of th e animal-machine would, therefore, have the same relation to lifethat a set of axioms has to geometry, th at is, nothing more than a rati onalreconstruction . Thus, the th eory operates by deception: it pretends to ignoreth e concrete existence ofwhat it must represen t, and it denies that what it

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actually produces comes only afte r it ha s been rationally legitimized.This aspect of Cartesian theory, moreover, was accurately assessed by a

contemporary anatomist, th e noted Nicolaus Steno, in th e Dissertation on theAnatomy if the Brain delivered in Pari s in 1665, a year after the "Treatis e onMan" had app eared. While paying homage to Descartes (which was remark-able, since anatomists had not always been very accepting of Cartesian anat-omy), he notes that Descartes's man was man reconstituted by Descarteswith God as a foil, but that this was not man as th e anatomist understandshim. One can th erefore say th at by substituting the body for the ma chine,Descartes removed teleology from life, but in appearance only, because hehas concentrated it in its entirety at the point at whi ch life begins. A dynamicstructure is replaced by an anatomical one; bu t since thi s form is produced bytechnique, all possible sense of teleology has been confined to th e techniqueof production . In fact , it appears that mechanical theory and purposivenesscanno t be placed in opposition, nor can mechanism and anthropomorphism.If th e functioning of a machine can be explained by relation s of pure causality, the construction of a machine canno t be understood without taking twothings in to consideration: a specific goal-directe d activity and man himself.A machine is made by man and for man , to achi eve spec ific ends, to producea given series of effects.25

The positive elem ent, th en, in Descartes's attempt to explain life mechani-cally is th at he eliminates the need to tie mechanism to finality in its anthropomorphic aspect. However, it seems that in doing this, one anthropomorphismhas been substituted for another. A technological anthropomorphi sm has beensubstituted for a political anthropomorphism.

In "Description of the Hum an Body and All of Its Funct ions," a short treati se written in 1648, Descar tes addresses th e qu estion of voluntary movementin man: he offers, in terms so lucid that th ey were to dominate the entire th eory of re flex and au tomat ic movements up unt il th e nineteenth century, theexplanat ion th at th e body obeys th e soul only on condition that th e body isprimed mechanically to do so. For th e soul to decide to move is not a sufficient conditio n to induce th e body to move. "The soul," writes Descartes"cannot produce any movement without th e appropriate disposition of th ebodily organs which are required for making the movem ent. On th e contrary,when all th e bodily organs are approp riately dispo sed for some movement,th e body has no need of th e soul in order to produce that movement."26Descar tes means th at when th e soul moves the body it does not act like a kingor a general command ing his subjects or his troops as is popularly conceived.Rather, by viewing th e body as a clock mechanism he envisions each organdrivinp the other like in terlo cking cogwheels. So Descartes substitutes forth e image of th e pol itical chain of command - where commands are passed

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by signals or spoken orders, th rough a type ofmagical causality - th e technological image of "co ntrol," in which a desired series of ope rations is activatedby a controlling device or coordinated by a series ofmechanical linkups.

Descartes takes th e exact opposite position ofClaude Bernard who, in hiscritique of vitalism, in Lecons sur les phenomenes de la vie communs aux anima uxer aux veBewux, refuses to admit th at a vita l force could have a separate exis tence because it "ca nno t do anything" - but he does admit, surprisingly, thatit can "direct phenomena that it does not produce."27 In other words, Bernardreplaces th e notion of a vital-force- as-worker wit h the idea of vital-force-aslegislator or guide. This is a way of admitting that one can direct events without taking action - which bo rders on a kind of magical concept of direction,implying that th e overall operation transcends the execution of individualop erations. On th e contrary, according to Descartes, a mechanical operationreplaces th e power of direction and command, but God has fixed th e di rection on ce and for all: the constructor includes the guide-controls within th emechanical process itself.

In short, with th e Cartesian explanation, it might appear th at we have notmoved beyond the idea of fin ality or inner pu rposiveness. The reason for thi sis that if we limit ourselves to th e workings of th e machine, everything can beexplained by the theory ofmechanism; but the theory cannot account for theconstruction of th e machine itself. Machines do not constr uct other machines,an d it could even be said th at, in a sense, explaining organs or organismsthrough mechanical models amounts to explaining th e organ by means of itself. At bottom , then, we are dealing with a tau tology; for it can be shown and I shall indeed t ry to ju stify this view - that machin es can be considered asorBans ?J the human species.28 A tool or a machine is an organ, and organs aretool s or machines. And so it is hard to see how mechanism can be distingui shed from purposiveness. 0 one doubts th at a mechanism is needed toensure th at a g iven operat ion is carried out successfully; and , conversely,every mechanism must follow a precisely determined sequence toward per forming some particular task, since a mechanism cannot depend on rand omness or chance . Th erefore, the opposition would be between those mechanismswhose purpose is manifest and those wh ose purpose remains laten t . In th ecase of a lock or a watch, thei r fun ction is apparent, while the pin cer s of th ecrab, of ten considered a marvel of adaptation, have a latent purpose. As aresult, it seems impossible to deny th at certain biological mechanisms servea set purpose. Let us consider an oft-cited example, which mechanistic biol ogists use to argu e their case; namely, th at of th e woman's pelvis, which en larges ju st before she gives birth . To deny that thi s enlargement migh t not insomeway be the fulfillment of a fundamen tal, purposive acti vity, we need onlyview th e qu estion in another way: given th at th e largest-sized fetus exceeds

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the maximum size of the pelvis by 1 or 1.5 em, it would be impossible to givebirth were it not for a loosening of th e symphyses and a gradual roc king movement toward the sacrococcyg ien bone which increases the d iameter ever soslightly beyond it s maximum . It is under standable that one would not want tobelieve that an act with suc h a specific biological purpose is allowed to occu ronlyby virtue of a mechanism with no real biological function. And "allow" isindeed the word that applies here, since without th is mechanism th e act sim ply could not take place. It is well known that, whe n dealing with an unknownmechanism , we have to make certain th at it is in fact a mechanism - th at is, wehave to know what ultimate purpose or func tion it is in tended to serve . Wecan come to no conclusions about how it is to be used , simply on th e basis ofit s form or its structure, unl ess we already know how the machine or similarmachines are used . As a resul t , it is necessary first to see the machine at workbefore attempting to deduce the fun ction from the structu re.

We are now at the point where we can see the historical reversal of th e Cartesianrela tionship between the machine and the organism. It is a we ll-known fact- and so need no t be belabored - that in all organisms we obse rve the phenomena of au toconstruction, automaintenance, autoregulation and autorepair.In the case of the machine, its construc t ion is beyond its power and dep endson the skill of the mechanic. It s maintenance requires the constant attentionand watc hfulness of the machinist; for we all know how the complex workingsof a machine can be irremedi ably damaged du e to inattent ion and carelessness.As for maintenance and repair, they demand the same per iodic in terventionof hum an action . While there are machines that are self-regulating, these arein fact machines that man has grafted onto ano ther machine. The const ruct ion of servomechanisms or electronic automata merely displaces the qu estionof the man- mac hine relationship without changing it in any fundamental way.

Fur ther, in th e case of th e machine ther e is a strict adhere nce to rational,economical rul es. The whole is rigorously th e sum of its par ts. The final effectdep end s on the ordering of the causes. What is more, a machine funct ion swithin nar rowly defined limits, and these limits become all th e more rigid withth e practice of standardization. Standardizat ion leads to th e simplification ofbasic model s and spa re parts, and to unified standards of measurement andquality, whic h allows for the interchangeability of parts. Any individual partcan be exchanged for any other part meant for the same place - within, ofcourse , a margin of tolerance determined by manu facturing constraints.

Now th at th e properties of a machine have been defined in relation to thoseof an organism, can one say that there is more or less purposiveness in a machine th an in an organism?


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One would surely agree th at the re is more purposiveness in machinesthan in organisms, since a machine seems to move uniformly, unidirectionallytoward complet ing a particular activity. A machine cannot replace ano thermachine. The more specific the end -resu lt desired , the more the margin oftol erance is reduced , and the mo re the machine's directiveness seems concentrated , focused on a particula r end . It is well known that fun ct ions in theorganism are substitutable, organs are polyvalen t . Although this substitutability of functions and polyvalence of organs is not absolu te, in compa rison withthe same qualities in the mach ine, it is so considerable that any comparisonis quite obviously absurd .s? As an example of the subst i tutability of functions,I can give a ve ry simple and well-known case, that of aphasia in children. Ahemiplegia on the right side of the child's brain is almost never accompaniedby aphasia, because the other areas of the brain ensure the cont inuance of t helinguistic fun ctions. In th e case of t he child who is less than nine months old,any ex isting aphasia disappear s very qui ckly.30As for th e problem of the polyvalent organs, I need simply note the fact that for a majority of organs, whichwe have traditionally bel ieved to serve some definite fun ction, the t r uth isthat we have no idea wh at other fun ctions they migh t indeed fulfill. This isthe reason that the stomach is said to be, in principle at leas t, an organ ofdigestion . However, it is a fact that after a gastrec tomy performed to treat anulcer, there are fewer problems wi t h digestion than wi th those we ob servewit h hematopoiesis. It was finall y discovered that the stomach behaves likean in ternal sec re tive gland. And I might also cite yet ano the r example - andnot at all to be taken as some sort ofmira cle - which came to light duringa recent experiment performed by the biologist Courrier, at the College deFrance. Courr ier mad e an incision in the uterus of a p regnant rabbit, extracted a placenta from the uterus and placed it in the peritoneal cavity. Thisplacenta grafted itself onto the intestine and fed itself normally.When thegraft was performed , the rabbit's ovaries were ablated - meaning that thefunction fulfilled by th e corpus luteum du ring pregnancywas suppressed. Atthat moment, all the placentas present in the uterus were aborted and onlythe placenta situate d in the peritoneal cavity came to term . Here is an exam ple of the intestine behaving like a uterus, and pe rhaps, one migh t even say,more successfully.

In th is case, then, it is tempting to reve rse one ofAri stotle's formulati on sin his Politics: "For nature is not stingy, like th e smi th who fashions the Delphi an knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use, and everyin strument is best made whe n in tended for one and not for many uses." 31On the cont rary, it seems that thi s definition of finality or purposivenesswould be more applicable to a machine than to an organi sm . One mu st bewilling to acknowledge, ultimately, t hat in an organism, a given organ can

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accommodate a diversity of functi ons. Clearly, an organism has a greater rangeo f activity th an a machine. It is less bound by purposiveness and more op ento potentialities.P Every aspe ct and every movem ent of the ma chine is calcu-lated ; and the wo rking of the machine confirms how each calculation hol dsup to ce rt ain nor ms, measu res or estimates; whereas the living body functionsaccording to exper ienc e. Li fe is exper ience, meaning improvisation, acting ascircumstances per mi t; life is tentative in every respect. Hence the overwhelm-ing but of ten misunderstood fact that life permits mo nstrositi es. Ther e are nomonstrou s ma chines. Th ere is no mechanical pat hology, as Xavie r Bichat notedin 1801 in his GeneralAnatomy, Applied to Physiolo8Y and Medicine. 33 Whereasmonsters are still living things, there is no way to distinguish bet ween th e nor -mal an d the pathological in physics an d mechanics. Onl y am ong living beingsis th ere a distinction between th e norm al and th e pathological.

Above all, it is wor k in experimental em bryology that has led to the aban-do ning of suc h mechanist ic rep resentations when in terpreting living phen om -ena, primarily by demonstra ting that once the embryo starts to develop, itdoes not co ntain any kind of "spe cific mechanism" in tended to produce auto-mat ically one organ or ano ther. There can b e no d.oubt that th is was Descartes'sconc eption as we ll. In his "Description of the Human Body," he wrote: "If wehad a goo d kn owledge of wha t makes up the seme n of some species of animalin particu lar , for example man , then we wou ld be ab le to deduce from th isalone, using certain an d mat hem atical reasoning, the complete sha pe andconformation of eac h of its members, and likewise, reciprocally, if we knewmany par ticul ar iti es about thi s conforma ti on, it would be possible to ded ucefrom th at what the semen is."34However, as Paul Guillaume remar ks, it seemsth at th e more we compare living be ings to automat ic machines, the more weseem to un derstan d th ei r functions but th e less we un derstan d th ei r genesis.35If the Ca rtesian conception were accurate, th at is, if th e living organism wereboth prefor med in th e em b ry o a nd developed mechanistically, any modifica-t ion made in the ea rliest stages would tend to di srupt the development of theegg or prevent development altogether.

However, thi s is hardly th e case. According to a st udy in potential egg devel-op ment, based on research by Driesch , H orst adius, Speman and Mangol d , itwas shown t hat em bryonic development cann ot be red uced to a mechanicalmodel witho ut running into anomalies. Let us ta ke the example of the exper-im ents conduc te d by Horst adius on the egg of a sea urchin . He cut an egg Afrom a sea urch in at stage sixteen so that eac h par t of the egg maintained ahor izontal symme try, and then he cut egg B, with ea ch part being ver ti callysymme trical. He joi ned half of A with hal f of B and th e egg developed nor-mally. D riesch took th e sea urchin egg at stage sixte en and pressed th e eggbetween tw o thin layers o f cells, while modi fying the recip rocal position of

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the cells at the two po les; sti ll, the egg developed normally. The results of thesetwo studies allow us to conclude that the same effect is achi eved regardle ss ofhow conditions are varied.

There is an even more striking exper iment , in which Dr iesch too k blasto -meres from th e sea urchin egg at stage two. By removing the blastomeres, eit hermechanically or chem ically in sea water lacking calcium salts, the result wasthat eac h of the blastomeres gave bir th to a larva which was perfectly no rmaldown to th e smallest deta il. Here , then, the result is the same regardless ofhow the cha rac teristics of a facto r are changed . The qu antitative change ina given factor does not lead to a qualitative change in the result . Conversel y,whe n two sea urchin eggs are joined they result in a single larva that is largerthan normal. This is yet another confirmatio n that the result is un affected bythe qu antitative change in one of the facto rs. Whether the factors are mult iplied or divid ed , the exper iment yields the same results.

I should add tha t the development of all eggs cannot be reduced to thi sschema. For quite some time t here was a problem in knowing whet her therewere two di fferent kind s of eggs at issue: regu lated eggs, like the eggs of seaurchins, and mosaic eggs, like those of frogs, whos e firs t blastomeres developin exactly the same way, whether th ey are dissociated or remain together. Mostbiologists have recently come around to admitting that wha t distingu ishes thetwo phenomena is simply that de termination occurs earlier in the so -calledmosaic eggs. On the one hand , the regulated egg sta r ts to act like a mosaicegg at a certain stage; on the ot he r hand , at stage two the blastomere of thefrog egg yields a complete embryo, as do es a regul ated egg, if it is reversed .Jf

Thus, it is illusory to deny the idea of purposiveness in orga nisms and toattribute it to automa tic functions , however complex we might imagin e theseto be . As long as a machine canno t construct itsel f, and as long as an orga nism is not equal to the sum of its parts, it migh t seem legitimate to think th atbiological organiz ati on is th e bas is and the necessary condition for the existence and purpose of a machi ne. From the philosophical point of view, it isless importan t to explain the operation of a machine than to understand it .And to understand it means to in scribe it in human history by in scribinghuman history in life - not overlooking the fact th at with the advent of manther e appeared a culture that was no longer entirely reducible to natural causes.And so we arr ive at th e point where the machine is seen as ajGct ifculture,expr essed in mechanisms that are th emselves noth ing more th an an explain-ablefac t ifnature. In a celebrated text in "Principles of Philosophy," Descarteswrites, " It is certain that all the ru les of mechanics belong to physics, to theextent that all artificial thinBs are thereby natural . Sinc e, for example, when awatc h counts the hours, by using the cogs from which it is mad e, this is noless natural for it than it is for a tree to produ ce fruit ."37But, from our point

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of view, we can and must reverse the relation ship of the watch to the tree andsay that the cogs and generally all the components that make up a watc h aredes igned to produce a desired effect: all th e parts of the mechanism are prod -uct s of imaginat ion , eac h piece fulfilling some final purpose or design th at atone time was only imagined or dreamed of; they are thus the direct or indirectproducts of a technical activity that is as authe ntically organic as the flower ing of trees. And , on a more fundamental level, the process wo rks with greatefficiency even though th ere is no more conscious obse rvance of the ru lesand laws of physics than there might be within vegetal life. Although the con-struction of a ma chine might presuppose at some stage the understanding ofthe logics of physics, it should not and cannot be forgotten that, as a matterof chro nology and biology, const ruc tion of machines took place well beforether e was any understanding of physics.However, another author has asserted , cont r ary to Descartes, that livingorganisms canno t be reduced to a machine and, similarly, art cannot be re-du ced to science. The author in qu estion is Kant, in his Critique rJJ ud8men t.While it is true that the French have not tended to look to Kant as a philoso -pher of technique, it is no less true th at German authors greatly interested inth is question, especially after 1870, ha ve don e so.

In the "Critique ofTeleological Judgmen t," Kant distinguishes betweenthe machine and the organism, while drawing on Descartes's favorite exam -ple of the watch . In a machine, he states, each part ex ists for th e other butnot because of the other: no part produce s another part; no one part is pro-duced by the entire unit; nor does one part produce ano the r par t of similarkind . There is no watc h th at makes other watches. 0 part can replace itself.And no machine can replace one of its own missing parts. And so, while amachine possesses motor power, it has no transformational ene rgy th at migh tpropagate itsel f or be transmitted to an object outside the ma chine itself. Kantdraws a distinction between human skill and technology, whic h are markedby in tention ality, as opposed to involuntary life processes. But in an important passage of the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgmen t," Kan t defines the or igi -nality o fhuman skill as i t relates to knowledge:

Art, regarded as human skill, differs from science (as ability differs from knowledge)in the same way that a practical aptitude differs from a theoretical faculty, as tech-nique differs from theory.What one is capable of doing, as soon aswe merely knowwhat ought to be done and therefore are sufficiently cognizant of the desired effect,is not called art. Only that which a man, even if he knows it completely, may nottherefore have the skill to accomplish belongs to art. Camper describes very exactlyhow the best shoes must be made, but he certainly could not make one.38

This text is cited by Paul Krannhals in Der Welts inn der Technik , and, followingKan t, he acknowledges that all technique is essentially primordial, meaning th at

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it cannot be reduced to a simple question of rationality.39 Indeed, we tend to seethe skilled hand that adjusts a machine or the mind that care fully orches t ratesa production process as examples of " ingenuity," having their basis in instinct;but th ese are in fact as difficult to explain as the production ofmammalian eggsoutside the ovary, even in the even t that the physio chemical composition ofprotoplasm and of sexual hormones had been made entirely clear to us.

This is why the wor k of anthrop ologists (and not eng ineers) seems to shedmore light, however faint, on the qu est ion of the construction of machines.40Currently in Fr ance, ethnologists have come closest to creat ing a philosophyof t echnique in which the philosophers themselves seem to have lost interest,their main concern having been chiefly the philosophy of science. On the co ntrary, the ethnographers have gene rally focused their atte ntion on th e relationship between the production of the earliest tools, the first instrumentsthat were used to act upon and modify nature, and the ways these tools we reassembled or grouped together. The only philosopher in France I know tohave posed these qu est ion s is Alfred Espinas, in hi s classic text on Les Oripinesde la tecbnoloqie." This wo rk in cludes an appendix , the outline for a co urset aught at the Facu lte des Lettres at Bordeaux aro un d 1890, which dealt wi ththe wi ll, and in which Espinas addressed, under the gu ise of wi ll, the qu estion of pract ical human beh avior and especially the invention of tools. Bybor rowing the th eory of organic ex tension from the Ge rman writ er ErnstKapp, Espinas was able to explain the cons t ruction of the firs t tools. Kappfir st made his th eories known in 1877.42According to the theory of exte nsion, whose philosophical bases go back to Hartmann 's The Philosophy i f theUnconscious and further back st ill to Schopenhauer, the earliest tools weresimply extensions of moving human organs. T he flin t , the club and the leverex tend and magni fy the organic movement of the ar m and its ability to strike.This theory, like all theories, has it s limits and runs in to ce rtain st umblingblocks, espec ially whe n it is used to ex plain fundame ntal inventions, suc has fir e and the wheel. In these cases, we would sea rch in vain for the bodymovements and th e organs th at fire and th e wheel are supposed to prolong orex tend; but the explanation cer tainly works for instrumen ts like th e hammeror the lever and all suc h related tools. In France, then, it was the ethnograph ers who sought out and compiled not on ly th e facts but also the hypothesesfrom which a biological philosophy of technique co uld be con stituted. Thephilosophical path was laid out by the Germansw - for example, the theoryof the development of invention s based on th e Darwinian notion of variationand natural selection, as advanced by Alard Du Bois-Reymond in his EifindunBund Eifinder (1906), or again, by Oswa ld Spengler in DerMensch und die Tecbnik ,which presented the theory tha t machines are constructed as a "life t actic" 44- and is taken up again, indep endently it seems , by Andre Leroi- Gourhan

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in his book Milieu et techniques. Leroi-Gourhan at temp ts to ex plain the ph enomenon of the construction of tools by compar ing it to the movem ent ofth e amoeba, which ex tends subs tances out beyond its mass so that it mightseize and capture an objec t it wis hes to digest:

I fwe are drawn to view the act of percussion as the fundamental technical activity, it is because we witness an act of touch or contact in almost every technological process; but even though the amoeba 's expansion always leads its prey throughthe same digestive process, there is no one way of explaining the working of thatprocess - whether we view the material being digested or whether we approachthe question from any given view of technology - since our view must changeaccording to the circumstances, just as the digestive process itself might be likethe various specialized grasping or striking organs.45

In th e last chapter s of thi s work one finds a theory ofmachine th at is altoget he r di fferent from the traditional theories that, for lack of a better term,I shall classify as Cartes ian - where technical invention amounted to theapplica tion of a given system of knowledge .

Traditiona lly, the locomotive is presented as a clas sic example of a "marvel of science." However, the construction of the steam eng ine is only understa ndable when placed in ligh t of theore tical kn owledge that preceded it , asthe cul mination of an age -o ld probl em , and a speci fically technological oneat that - how to pump water out of mines. And so it wou ld be necessary tounderst and the natural history of the developmen t of the pump, and to knowabout the fir e pump (which at first did not rely at all on vapor but produced avacuum via condensation under th e pistons, thereby allowing th e atmosph ericp ress ure acting as a motor to lower the piston) in orde r to see that the essent ial "o rgan" in a locomotive is a cylinder and a piston.w

Tracing a similar progression of id eas, Leroi-Gourhan goes even further,pointing back to th e wheel as one of th e locomot ive 's ancesto rs, in th e biological sense of th e wo rd . " It is machines like the wheel," he states, " that gave riseto steam engi nes and modern-day motors . All of the highest t echnologicalachi evements of the most inventive minds of our time can be gro uped aro undthe circular movements of the crank, th e pedal, the dr ive bel t."47 He the n goeson to add : "The way inventions influenced eac h ot he r ha s not been studiedsufficiently and we don't seem to take note of the fact th at , without th e wheel,we would no t have the locomotive."48 Further on :

At the beginning of the nineteenth century no one had yet recognized how to makeuse of the elemental forms that would later give birth to the locomotive, the automobile and the airplane. The underlying pr inciples of mechanics were spreadthroughout twenty applications which had been known for many centuries. It ishere we find the principle that explains inventi on , but the defining characteristicis that it in somewaymanifests itself spontaneously.f?

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In ligh t of these remarks, we see how scienc e and technique mu st be considered as two separate areas; th at is, they do not graft onto each other bu t, rather,each takes from th e othe r either its solutions or its problems. It is th e ration alizing an d or dering imposed by tech nology th at makes us forget th at machineshave th ei r origin in the irrational. In thi s are a as in all others, it is necessary toknow how to accommodate the ir rati onal, even when - an d espe cially when- we want to defen d rati onali sm .50

It must be added th at th e reversal of the relation ship between th e machineand th e organism, bro ugh t about by a systema ti c understanding of technicalinven tion s as if th ey were ex tensions of hu man beh avior or life processes,is in someway confirme d by th e beli e f th at th e gene ralized use of machineshas slowly im posed contemporary indu strialized soc iety on man . Geo rgeFr iedmann has shown very clea rly th e ste ps by wh ic h "body" graduallybecame a fir st-order term in th e human ma chine-body equation. 51 WithFrederick Taylor and th e first technicians to ma ke scientific studies of worktask movements, th e hu man body was measured as if it fun ctioned like amachine. I fwe see th ei r aim as the elimination of all un necessary movementand their view of output as being expressed only in te rms of a ce rt ain nu mber of mat hem atically dete rmined facto rs, th en rati onalization was, for allintents and pu rposes, a me chanizatio n of th e body. But th e realization th attech nologically supe rfluous movem ents were biologically necessary movemen ts was the fir st stumbling block to be encounte re d by th ose who insistedon viewing th e problem of hu man -body-as-ma chine in exclusively technological terms. From here on , th e systematic examination of certain physiological, psychotech nological an d even some psychological conditions (sincea consideration ofvalues lea ds inevitably to qu estions at the very ce nter ofth e origin of hu man personality) finally culmina te d in a reversal, called aninevitable revolution by Fr iedma nn, in which tech nology would ada pt machines to the hu man body. As Friedmann saw it , thi s industr ial te chnologyappeared to ta ke th e form of a scientific rediscovery of th e same en tirelyempirical procedures through which primitive peoples had always soughtto have thei r to ols meet th e highest organic nor ms: that is, th eir tools had tocarr y out a given action effectively while maintaining a biological eco nomy;an d thi s oc curred at the op timum level, when it mo st closely appro ximatedthe movem en t of the body at work, as when th e body de fends it self spontaneou sly from becoming exclusively subordinate to the mechanicaJ.S2 In th isway, Friedmann could spe ak, without irony or paradox, of th e legitimacy ofco nside ring th e ind ustr ial development of the West from an et hnographicpo int of view.53

In summary, by considering te chnology as a universal biological phenorn eno nv ' and no longer simply as an in tellectual operat ion to be carr ied out by


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Machi ne and Or ga nism

man , I am led to the following conclusions: on the one hand , the creativeauto nomy of th e ar ts and skilled crafts in relation to all forms of knowledgeth at are capable o f annexing them or expanding on th em ; and, on the otherhand, to inscribe the mech anical into the organic . It is no longer then , a question of determining the extent to which an organism can be thought of as amachine, whether by virtue of its structure or of it s fun ctions. But it is necessary to find the reasons that gave ri se to the opposite view, the Cartesian one.I have at tempted to shed light on thi s problem , suggesting tha t the mechanist ic conception of th e body was no less anthropomorphic, despite app earances,th an a teleological conception of th e physical world. The answer I am temptedto offer wou ld insist on showing that technology allows man to live in continui ty with life, as opposed to a solution that wo uld see humankind as livingin a state of rupture for which we ourselves are responsible because of sc ience. Ther e is no doubt that thi s answer appears to lend crede nce to th e listof accusations that all to o many writers have of fered up no stalgically fromtime to time , with no apparen t regard to th eir lack of ori ginality, as th ey pointout the faults of technology and progress. I have no in tention of rushing tosupport thei r cause. I t is clear that if human society has embraced the idea ofa technology ba sed on a mechanistic model, the implications are enormous,and the whole question cannot easily be treated lightly or recalled on demand .But that model is altoge ther different from the one just examined.NO TES

1. Afte r having been dogmatically accep ted by biologists for many years, the mechanistic theory of the organism is now considered narrow and inadequate by those scient ists whocall themselves dialectical mater ialists. But the fact that they still concern themse lves withformulating a philosophical position could easily support the rather widesp read idea th atphilosophy does not possess its own domain, th at it is a poor relation of speculation, andmust clothe itself in the hand-me-downs scientists have used and then discarded . It will bemy aim to show that the problem of machine and organis m is much broader in scope andmo re philosophically important th an is commonly thought ; and that it is far mor e than atheoretical and methodological d ispute among biologists.

2. Juli en Pacotte, La Pensee technique (Paris: Alcan , 1931).3. One example of the fundamental principles of a general th eory of mechanisms un

derstood in this way can be found in Franz Reuleaux's Theoretiscbe Kinetnatik: Grundz iiBeeiner Theorie desMaschinwesen (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1875).

4. For everything conce rning machines and mec hanisms, see Pacotte, La Pensee tech -nique, ch. 3.

5. According to Marx, a tool is moved by human power while th e machine is movedby a natural force; see his Capital , trans. Samuel Moo re and Edwa rd Aveling (New York:International Publishers, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 374-79.


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6. For more on this, see Charles Victo r Daremberg, Hi stoire des sciences medicales(Paris: Bailliere, 1870) , vol. 2, p. 879.

7. Gomez Pereira, Antoniana MarBarita: Opus pbysicis, medicis ac theoloqis non minusutile quam necessarium (Medi na del Campo, 1555-58).

8. Alfred Espinas, "L'Organisa tion ou la machine vivante en Grece au Iv e siecle avantJ. -c.," Revue de metaphvsique et de morale (1903), pp. 702-15.

9. P.-M. Schuhl, Mach inisme et philosophic (Paris: Alcan, 1938).10. Aristotle's Politics, trans. Hi ppocrates G. Apostle and Lloyd P. Gerson (Grinnel,

Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1986), bk . I, ch . 2, sees. 4- 7.II. Lucien Laberthonniere, Les Etudes sur Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1935), especially th e

append ix to volume 2: "La Physiqu e de Descar tes et la physiqu e d 'Ar istote,"12. Franz Borkenau, Der UberBanB vomJeudalem zum biirqerlichen Weltbi/d (Paris :

Alcan , 1934) .13. Jean de la Fon taine's fable, "The Cobbler and the Businessman" (in La Fontaine:

Selected Fables, t ran s. Jami e Michi e [New York: Viking, 1979] , pp. 188-91) is an excellentillustration of th e two different conceptions ofwork and its remuneration .

14. Henryk Grossmann, "Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der mechanistischenPhilosophi e und die Manufaktur," Zeitschrij:f ur Sozialiorschunp, 4 th ser., vol. 2 (1935) ,pp. 161-23 1.

15. "Mechanization" here means the gene ralized use of machines to replace humanlabor. However, it was also used to descr ibe Descartes's th eory of animals as machinesbefore th e nineteenth century when the above usage was in force - TRANS .

16. In Descar tes's "Pr inci ples of Philosophy" (4.187 [AT 8A.314], Descartes: SelectedPhilosophical WritinBs, tran s. John Co tt ingham, Rob ert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch[New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988] , pp. 199 -200) , there are a few passagesth at reveal Descar tes to be equally interested in gunpowder, bu t he did not look for ananalogous explanatory principle for th e animal organism in th e explosion of gunpowderas a source of energy. It was an English doctor, Th omas Willi s, who explicitly formulateda theory ofmuscular movem en t based on th e analogy with what occurs when th e powderexp lodes in a harquebus. In the seventeenth century, Willis compared the ne rves to powder lines in a manner th at remai ns valid today in some qu arter s - most notably, W M.Bayliss comes to mind . Nerves are a sort of Bickford cord. They produce a spark th at willset off, in th e mu scle, an explosion that, in Willi s's view, is th e only thing capable of accoun ting for th e phenomena of spasm and prol onged contraction observed by th e doctor.

17. "For th ere is withi n us bu t one soul, and thi s soul has wit hi n it no d iversity ofparts: it is at on ce sensitive and ration al too, and all its appetites are volitions" ("T hePassions of th e Soul" 47, in Selected Philosophical WritinBs, P: 236) .

18. "Discourse on Method " 5 (AT 6.56 ff.) , in ibid. , p. 44 ff. Letter to th e Marquis ofNewcastle, Nov. 23, 1646.

19. Letter to Morus, Feb . 21, 1649, in Descar tes, Correspondence, ed . Charles Adamand Ge rard Milhaud (Paris: P.U .F., 1963), vol. 8, pp . 121- 39. In order to understand

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adequa tely the relationship of sensib ility to th e arrangement of th e organs, we must befamiliar with th e Cartesian theory of th e degrees of sense; on thi s subject, see Descartes,"Author 's Replies to th e Sixth Obj ections" 9 (AT 7.436- 39), in The Philosophical WritinBsi fDescartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge,Eng.: Cambridge Univers ity Press, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 294-96.

20. Descartes, Letter to MOTUS, Feb. 21, 1649, in Correspondence, vol. 8, p. 138.21. Let ter to Conr ing, March 19, 1678, in GotifriedWilhelm Leibniz: Sdmtliche Schr!fien

und Briife (Darmstadt: Reichl , 1926 ) , 2d ser. , vol. I, pp . 397-401. Leibniz's outline ofcrite r ia in particular, which would allow us to d istinguish an animal from an automaton ,should be compared to the analogous arguments addu ced by Descartes, and also the profound reflections of Edgar Allan Poe on the same subject in his "Maelzel 's Chessp layer."On the Leibnizian distinction between the machine and the organism, see "A New Systemof the Nature and the Communication of Substances" 10, in Leibniz: Philosophical Papersand Letters, trans. and ed . Leroy Loemker (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1956),vol. 2; and "Monado logy" 63-66 , inMonadol0B.Y and OtherPhilosophicalEssays , trans. PaulSchrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (New York: Macmi llan , 1985) .

22. It is important to point out th at Leibniz was no less in terested th an Descar tes inth e invention and construction of machines, as well as in th e problem of automatons. Seeespec ially his corresponde nce with Duke John of Hanover (1676-1679) in the SdmtlicheSchr!fien und Briife (Darmstadt: Reichl , 1927), 1st ser., vol. 2. In a text of 1671,Bedenkenvon Atifrichw nBeiner Academie oder Societdt in Deutschland zu Atif"nehmen der Kunste undWissenscheifien , Leibniz exa lts the superiority of German art, which has always strived toproduce works th at move (watches, clocks, hydraulic machines, and so on) , over Italianart, which has always attached itse lf excl usively to the fabr icat ion of lifeless objec ts madeto be contemplated from without (ibid. [Darmstadt: Reichl, 1931], 4th ser., vol. I, p. 544) .Thi s passage is ci ted by Jacqu es Maritain in his Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers i fPoetry, trans. Joseph W Evans ( ew York: Scribners, 1962), P: 156.

23. "Treatise on Man" (AT XI. 119-20) , in The Philosophical WritinB s ifDescartes, trans.Joh n Cottingham, Rob er t Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, Eng : CambridgeUniversity Press, 1985) , vol. 1, p. 99.

24 . This phrase is a traditional equivalent of " the human body," especially in th eeigh teent h century - TRANS .

25. Moreove r, Descartes can on ly express the meaning of God 's const ruc tion of animal-machines in terms of finality: "conside ring the machine of the human body as havingbeen formed by God in order to have in itself all the movements usually manifested there"("Six th Meditati on ," in Philosophical Works ifDescartes [1913] , trans. Elizabet h S. Haldaneand G. R. T. Ross [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967], vol. I, P: 83). [Here th ewording of th e older tra nslat ion is more liter al than is the tra nslation of Cottingham et al.,Philosophical WritinBs ifDescartes, vol. 2, pp. 50-62 - TRANS .]

26. "Description of th e Hum an Body and All of Its Fun ctions" I (AT II. 225), inPhilosophical WritinBs ifDescartes, vol. I, p. 315.

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27. Claude Bernard, Lecons sur les phenomenes de la vie communes aux animaux et auxveBhaux: 1878-1 879 (Paris: Masson , 1936).

28. For more on thi s idea, see Raymond Ruyer, Elements de psycbo-bioloqie (Paris:P.U.F., 1946), pp. 46-47.

29. "Artificial means what is aimed at a definite goal. And is opposed th erefore tolivinp . Artificial or human or anthropomorphic are dis tinguished from whatever is onlyliving or vital. Anyt hing th at succeeds in appea ring in th e form of a clear and finite goalbecomes artificial and thi s is wha t tends to happen as consc iousness grows. It is also trueof man's work when it is in tended to imitate an object or a spo ntaneous phenomenon asclose ly as possible. Th ought th at is conscious of itself makes itself int o an artificial systern.... If life had a goal, it would no longer be life" (Paul Valery, CahierB [Paris: Gallimard,1910]) .

30. See Ed . Pichon, LeDeveloppetnent psychique de l 'enf ant et del 'adolescent (Par is:Masson , 1936), P: 126 ; and Paul Cossa, PhysiopatholoBie du systeme nerveux (Paris: Masso n,1936), p. 845.

31. Politics, bk. I, ch. I (1252b), in The Basic Works i fAristotle, ed. Richard McKeon( ew York: Rand om House, 1941), p. 1128.

32. Max Schele r, in hisMans Place in Nature [1928] (trans. Hans Meyer hoff [Boston:Beacon , 1961], pp . 75-8 1), has remarked th at it is those living thi ngs th at are th e leastspecialized that are the most di fficult to explain by th e mechanistic idea, pace the mechanists, because in thei r case all functi ons are carried out by th e whole organism. It is onlywith the growing differentiation of functions and the increased complexity of the nervou ssystem that structures which resemble a machine in somefashion tend to appear

33. GeneralAnatomy,Applied to PhysioloBY and Medicine, trans. George Hayward(Bosto n: Richardson and Lord , 1822).

34. "Description du corps humain" I (AT II. 225) , in Charles Adam and PaulTannery, eds., Ouevres deDescartes (paris: Vrin, 1974) , vo l. II , P: 225. [This pasage is omitted from the English translation of "Description of the Human Body and ofAJI of ItsFunctions" - TRAN S.]

35. Paul Guillaume, La Psycbolopie de lafo rme (Par is: Flammarion, 1937), P: 131.36. Pierre Grasse and Max Aron, Precis de bioloqie animale (2d ed., Paris: Flammarion,

1947), p. 647ff.37. 4.203, in Philosophical WritinBsifDescartes, P: 288. See also my study "Descartes

et la technique," Travaux du CanBres International de Philosophie, vol. 2: Etudes cartesiennes(Paris: Hermann , 1937), p. 77 ff.

38. "An organized being is not a mere machine, for th at has merely moving power, butit possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind which it communicates toits materials though they have it no t of themselves; it organizes them , in fact, and th is cannot be explained by the mere mech anical faculty of motion" (Critique i fJ udBment, tr ans.J. H. Bernard [New York: Hafner, 1951], p. 22).39. Krannhals, Der Weltsin der Technik (Munich and Berlin: Oldenb ourg, 1932), P: 68.


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Machin e and Organism

40. The starting point for these works must be sough t in Darwin , The Descent ifMan -whose ideas Marx saw clearly as immen sely significant.41. Alfred Espinas, Les OriBin es de la tecbnoloqi e (Paris: Alcan, 1897 ) .42. Erns t Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig:

Westermann, 1877). Thi s work, which was a classic in Ge rmany, has rem ained so misunderstood in France that cer ta in psychologists who took up th e problem of how animalsutili ze tools, and animal in telligence, and who took the research of Kohler and Guillaumeas thei r starting point, attributed thi s th eory of projection to Espin as him self, withoutnoting th at Espinas states explicitly, at numerous junctures, th at he borrowed it fromKapp , I am alluding here to the excellent littl e book by Gaston Viaud, L'Intelliqence: Sonevolution et sesjormes (Paris: P.U.F. , 1946) .43. See Eberhard Zschimmer 's Deutsche Philosophen der Technik (Stuttgart: Enke, 1937).44 . Alard Du Bois-Reymond , ErfinduDB und Erfi nder (Berlin: Springer, 1906) ; and

Oswald Spengler, Der Mensch und die Techni k (Munich: Beck, 1931). Alain outlined aDarwinian interpretation of technical constr uctions in a fine rem ark (Les Propos d'Alain[Paris: N.R.F., 1920], vol. 1, P: 60), preceded and followed by some othe rs th at are mostpertinen t to ou r problem. The same idea is refer red to many times in the Systeme desBeaux-Arts, concerning the making of the violin (4.5), furniture (6.5) , houses in the country side (6.3, 6.8) .45. And re Leroi-Gourhan , Evolution et technique, vol. 2:Milieu et techniques (Paris:

Michel, 1945).46. Th e double-a cting engine, in which the steam acted on th e upper and lower sides

of the piston alternately, was per fected byWatt in 1784. Sadi Carnot' s Riflexions sur lapuissa nce motrice duJe u dates from 1824, and we know that it was ignored until the middleof th e ninetee nth century. On thi s subject, see Pier re Du casse, H istoires des techniques(Paris: P.U.F., 1945), which st resses th at technique pr eced es th eory.On th e subject of the empirical succes sion of the various organs and uses of the steam

eng ine, consult Arthur Vierendeel's Esquisse d 'uoe histoire de la technique (Brussels andParis: Vrom ant, 1921), which summarizes Thurston 's extensive work, Hi story if the SteamEnpine, For more about the history of Wat t's work as an engineer read the chapter entitled "James Wat t ou Ariel ingeni eur," in Pier re Devaux's Les Aventures de la science (Paris:Gallimard, 1943).47. Leroi-Gourhan ,Milieu et techniques, P: 100. Th e same view can be found in an

article by A. Hadricourt on "Les Moteurs anirn es en agriculture" (Revue de botaniqueappliquee et d 'aqriculture tropicale 20 [1940] , P: 762) : "We must not forget that we owe ourinanimate motors to irrigation: the noria is at the origin of th e hydraulic mill, just as th epump is at the origin of th e steam engine." Thi s excellent study sets ou t th e principles forexp laining tools from th e perspective of th eir relationship to organic commodities andthe traditional ways they were used .48. Leroi- Gourhan ,Mi lieu et techniques, P: 104.49. Ibid ., P: 406.

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50. In his The Two Sources rfMorality and Religion (trans. R. Ashley Andra andCloudesley Brereton [New York: Holt , 1949]) , Henr i Bergson thinks very explicitly thatth e sp irit ofmec hanical invention, although it is fed by science, remains distinct fromit and can even , if necessary, be sepa ra ted from it (pp. 329-30). The fact is that Bergsonis also one of the rare French philosophers, if not the only one, who has considered mechanical invention as a biological fun ction, an aspect of the organization ofmat ter by life:Creative Evolution (trans. ArthurMit chell [New York:Modern Library, 1944 ) is, in somesense, a tr eatise of general organology.

On the subject of the relationship between explanation and act ion see also Paul Valery,"L'Homrne et la coqu ille" and "Di scours aux chirurgie ns," in Variete V (Paris: Gallimard ,1945), and hi s description of boat building in Eupalinos.

And , finall y, read th e admirable "In Pra ise ofHands" in Henri Focillon , The Life rfForms in Art (New York: Zone Books, 1989), pp. 157-84.51. Geo rge Friedmann, Problemes humains du machinisme industrielle (Par is: Gallimard ,1946).

52 . Ibid . , p. 96 , note.53. Ibid ., p. 369 .54. This at titude is one that has begun to be familiar among biologists. In particular,

see L. Cuenot, In vention etflnalite en biolopie (Par is: Flammarion, 1941); and Andree Tetry,Les Outils ch ez les etres vivants (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) - espec ially the lat ter's reflectionson "Adaptat ion and Invention" (p. 120ff.) . It is impossible to mistake th e impetus given tothese t reatments by th e ideas of Teilh ard de Chardin.A new discipline, Bionics, which emerged around ten years ago in th e United States,stud ies biological structures and systems able to be util ized as models or analogues bytechnology, notably by builders of systems for detection, di rect ion and equilibrat ionmeant for equipping planes or missiles. Bionics is th e extreme ly subtle a rt o f informationthat has taken a leaf from natural life. The frog, with its eye capable of selecting in formation that is instantly usable, th e rattl esnake, with its thermocep tor which tr aces th e bloodof its prey at nigh t, the common fly, balancing itself in fligh t by means of two vibratilefilam en ts, have all furnished models for thi s new breed of engineers. In many Ameri canuniversiti es, special training in Bioengineering is available, for which the Massachuset tsInstitute ofTechnology seems to have been the instigator. See th e articl e by J. Dufre noy,"Systernes biologiques servant de mod eles 11 la tec hno logie," Cabiers des ingenieurs agronomes(Ju ne-July, 1962) , p. 21.

Translated from the French by Mark Cohen and Randall Ch erry

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Machine and Organism

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